Indiana can win a big one on the road

With this win, Indiana clinched a winning record on the Big Ten road—something that has happened at IU only once since 1993. A lot of people wanted to extrapolate that fact and other measures of the Hoosiers’ road struggles into evidence this Indiana team would not be able to seriously contend for the NCAA championship unless the entire tournament were to be played in Assembly Hall.

Except the factoid is more a measure of how much IU had withered in Bob Knight’s later years, how little momentum his first two successors generated and what a mess Tom Crean inherited when he arrived as coach. His best team to date, in 2011-12, produced only a 3-6 road mark.

Although last year’s Hoosiers laid a foundation for this team with their overall success, this is a different team. The players are older, the defense is better and freshman point guard Yogi Ferrell changes the chemistry for the better.

In this particular season, Indiana did not play any high-level non-conference road games. You may remember that was not entirely by choice—the Hoosiers had been due to visit Kentucky at Rupp Arena before UK chose not to continue the series on a home-and-home basis.

In conference, Indiana’s first five road games were all against teams that now hold sub-.500 league records. That includes two potential tournament contenders, though not certain ones, in Iowa and Illinois. IU won easily at Iowa, then blew the Illinois game. People remember the losses, though.

Will they remember how comfortably the Hoosiers beat OSU? Or that their road record is now 5-1?

We might not need a new No. 1 team

The habit of poll voters is to punish a top-ranked team that loses during the week it reigns. Indeed, Indiana’s from-the-jaws-of-victory collapse at Illinois probably merits a good spanking, but it would seem the Hoosiers redeemed themselves by learning the lessons taught in Champaign with a brilliant performance at OSU.

If it’s not Indiana, it could be Duke, and there’s much to recommend the Blue Devils. But many are having a tough time putting Duke ahead of Miami, which defeated the Devils by 27 points in Florida. But how could one put Miami ahead of Arizona when they played on a neutral court and Arizona won by 19?

It’s been abundantly clear the Big Ten has been the nation’s best league, and Indiana is tied for first at 9-2.

This does not matter in the least, except for those to whom it matters. A lot of people like to talk about this stuff. So it wouldn’t be ridiculous for them to be talking this week about Indiana.

Victor Oladipo is Indiana’s best player

With 16:16 left, Oladipo executed a hard cut to the middle post while star center Cody Zeller had the ball in the left corner. Oladipo had to beat two defenders to the spot, and Zeller threw the pass overly hard because he wanted neither to deflect it. It was a play perhaps best left unexplored, but Zeller made the attempt and it seemed a certain turnover as the ball approached its target.

Oladipo turned it into a bucket. He didn’t catch the ball clean, but he controlled it after it slipped from his hands. Then he rose up over two defenders and tossed in ajumphook. When he came down the next time and nailed a 3-pointer from the right wing, he’d scored 11 of IU’s 15 most recent points in establishing a 48-39 lead, and he’d made six consecutive shots.

With 13:40 left, Oladipo wound up with the ball in the left corner after an abandoned fastbreak. He drove baseline, saw his avenue to the goal blocked by a defender, then leaped in the air and looked as though he was going to attempt a floater from a nearly impossible angle. Nope. He saw Zeller near the left block, guarded by a single defender because of the attention Oladipo himself had drawn. Oladipo floated a pass back to Zeller, who was able to easily convert the layup.

While OSU superscorer Deshaun Thomas was scoring 26 points and shooting 8-for-20 from the floor, Oladipo served as the primary defender on Thomas, and making him work for every one of his points.

Coach Tom Crean is the guy who first mentioned Oladipo as being comparable to the man who carried his 2003 Marquette team to the Final Four. So don’t blame us for the comparison. But with Oladipo’s combination of dynamic athleticism, playmaking ability, you can see the Dwyane Wade that Crean sees in him.

Will Sheehey must break the gambling habit. He does it on offense, periodically firing heat-check shots that are not in keeping with the best of Indiana’s ball-movement approach. He’ll do it on defense, as he did with 12:09 remaining while matched against Thomas in the right short corner. Instead of staying in sound defensive position, Sheehey dove for a steal he always was unlikely to retrieve. He didn’t get it, which meant Thomas had the ball and momentum into a scoring move as Zeller arrived to try to cut off the path to an easy layup.

You can guess what happened: foul on Zeller. It was only his second personal, but all of Zeller’s fouls are precious. They must be dispensed sparely and judiciously. They should be used to cover for when a teammate gets beaten honestly, or when Zeller himself is the victim of an opponent’s great move.

Sheehey is such a weapon off the bench: a terrific scorer and defender who changes the makeup of the IU lineup when he’s deployed. He’s one of the biggest reasons there is no team in college basketball with a higher ceiling than IU. He’s played enough college basketball, though, and the stakes are high enough for the Hoosiers, that it’s time to play with maturity.